1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to specimen-container transfer apparatuses with which specimen containers containing blood, urine, or other biological samples used in clinical testing are taken out of a specimen-container rack and put into a housing rack in a prescribed order. It is particularly suitable for connection to a conveyance unit that shuttles specimen-container racks between analyzers.
2. Description of Related Art
In clinical testing in hospitals and test centers, various tests such as blood tests, biochemical tests, and general tests are conducted using blood, urine, and other such biological samples. The analyzers used in these tests are generally equipped with a sampler that automatically takes measurements once a specimen-container has been put into the specimen-container rack. Furthermore, conveyor systems that automatically transfer specimen containers between a plurality of analyzers have come to be used in recent years to improve efficiency (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Applications 63-217274 and 3-94159).
There are times when a specimen-container that has been tested in this way must be re-tested, depending on the test results thereof, the results of other tests, or the like. The specimen containers used in tests are therefore stored for a few days. This is desirable if each specimen-container rack is stored with the specimen containers just as they were when tested, but because specimen-container racks are slender in shape normally for five or ten specimen containers, a place must be prepared for the racks where they will not be tipped over and the order of the specimen containers changed. The standard procedure in testing is to assay specimens in the order they arrive, but this may be interrupted by an emergency specimen-container, or certain special specimen containers may be taken out, so finding the desired specimen-container can be difficult even if they were arranged in order after being measured, and this creates problems in terms of emergency testing, and the like, for facilities that handle large numbers of specimens.
Herein, it is preferable for specimens to be sorted by branch of medicine, in-patient/out-patient, etc., or for them to be rearranged into a suitable order by specimen-container ID numbering. This is manual work, however, and places a tremendous burden on facilities that handle a large number of specimens, which is why it is not actually performed very often.
This work conceivably could be automated by devising a conventional specimen-container conveyor unit by installing behind the analyzer a unit that rearranges into a prescribed order assayed specimen-container racks. But just rearranging the specimen containers in blocks of specimen-container racks will not be very effective unless the specimen containers are also arrayed in the specimen-container rack in the proper order.